Mark Twain, a Biography — Volume I, Part 1: 1835-1866 eBook

He went directly to St. Louis, sitting up three days
and nights in a smoking-car to make the journey.
He was worn out when he arrived, but stopped there
only a few hours to see Pamela. It was his mother
he was anxious for. He took the Keokuk Packet
that night, and, flinging himself on his berth, slept
the clock three times around, scarcely rousing or
turning over, only waking at last at Muscatine.
For a long time that missing day confused his calculations.

When he reached Orion’s house the family sat
at breakfast. He came in carrying a gun.
They had not been expecting him, and there was a general
outcry, and a rush in his direction. He warded
them off, holding the butt of the gun in front of
him.

“You wouldn’t let me buy a gun,”
he said, “so I bought one myself, and I am going
to use it, now, in self-defense.”

“You, Sam! You, Sam!” cried Jane
Clemens. “Behave yourself,” for she
was wary of a gun.

Then he had had his joke and gave himself into his
mother’s arms.

XX

KEOKUK DAYS

Orion wished his brother to remain with him in the
Muscatine office, but the young man declared he must
go to St. Louis and earn some money before he would
be able to afford that luxury: He returned to
his place on the St. Louis Evening News, where he
remained until late winter or early spring of the
following year.

He lived at this time with a Pavey family, probably
one of the Hannibal Paveys, rooming with a youth named
Frank E. Burrough, a journeyman chair-maker with a
taste for Dickens, Thackeray, Scott, and Disraeli.
Burrough had really a fine literary appreciation for
his years, and the boys were comrades and close friends.
Twenty-two years later Mark Twain exchanged with Burrough
some impressions of himself at that earlier time.
Clemens wrote:

MydearBurrough,—­As
you describe me I can picture myself as I was 22
years ago. The portrait is correct. You think
I have grown some; upon my word there was room
for it. You have described a callow fool,
a self-sufficient ass, a mere human tumble-bug, stern
in air, heaving at his bit of dung, imagining that
he is remodeling the world and is entirely capable
of doing it right.... That is what I was
at 19-20.

Orion Clemens in the mean time had married and removed
to Keokuk. He had married during a visit to that
city, in the casual, impulsive way so characteristic
of him, and the fact that he had acquired a wife in
the operation seemed at first to have escaped his
inner consciousness. He tells it himself; he
says: